Microsoft's Source Annotation Language (SAL) — any way to take advantage of it?

Question

Is there any way to take advantage of Microsoft's SAL, e.g. through a C parser that preserves this information? Or is it made by Microsoft, for Microsoft's internal use only?

It would be immensely useful for a lot of tasks, such as creating C library bindings for other languages.

Answer 1

Not sure what you mean by "take advantage of", but currently the VS 2011 Beta uses the SAL annotations when performing code analysis, via the the /analyze option. the annotations are just pure macro's from sal.h which Microsoft encourages the use of (at least in a VS environment).

If you just want to preserve the info after a preprocessing step, you could just make the macro's expand to themselves or just alter one of the exisitng open-source pre-processors to exclude the symbols (VS also has a few expansion options from the SAL macro's), but using the information provided by the annotations will require something along the lines of a custom LLVM pre-pass or GCC plugin to do this (if compiling the code, though you can at the same time use them for binding generation).

Answer 2

SAL annotations can find tons of bugs with static analysis.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh454825(v=vs.85).aspx

I have never had to set it from scratch, but my development environment will use prefast to do static analysis everytime I build something. Finding bugs at compile time is better than finding them at runtime.

Answer 3

Source annotations as far as my own personal experience has seen, is a useful way to quickly see how parameters are supposed to be passed or how they are assumed to be passed. As far as taking advantage of that, I agree that a prepass might be the only way to take real advantage, and might i suggest writing your own if you have specific needs or expectations on it's output. Hope I helped..